Dead Matter (Part One, Two & Three): How political corruption decimated Mpumalanga’s biodiversity

[Lisbeth]

By Kevin Bloom• 9 March 2021


Former Mpumalanga premier and current Deputy President David Mabuza. (Photo: Gallo Images / Sunday Times / Masi Losi) | Gauteng High Court. (Photo: Gallo Images / Lefty Shivambu) | Unsplash | Adobe Stock | EPA / NIC BOTHMA

In the first of this three-part series, Daily Maverick begins to outline the circumstances that led to the R1bn damages claim brought by conservationist Fred Daniel against the Mpumalanga Tourism and Parks Agency and a host of government entities in 2010. Due to kick off in July 2021, the case may turn out to be the most significant civil matter yet heard by the North Gauteng High Court — not because the name of South Africa’s deputy president, David Mabuza, is all over the plaintiff’s papers, but because the future of one of the planet’s most threatened biomes is at stake.

In the spring of 2008, on Charles Ndabeni’s first day as chief executive officer of the Mpumalanga Tourism and Parks Agency, he was well aware that he had inherited a pair of unprecedented and game-changing problems.

The bigger one, by his reckoning, was that the province’s world-renowned biodiversity, which had been protected by a succession of South African governments since 1898, was in steep and alarming decline.

The second was that tourists were no longer arriving in droves at the gates of either the Kruger National Park or the Blyde River Canyon, the major destinations in what had recently become a UNESCO International Man and Biosphere Reserve, and that there had been a marked drop in visitors to the province since 2003.

By any objective measure, Ndabeni was the perfect man for the job. In August 2011, when he would resign before the termination of his five-year contract, the proof of his mettle would be found in the fact that Mpumalanga had just been ranked the third most-visited province in the country, from an all-time low (back when he had started out as CEO) of seventh place.

But a chain of events had been set in motion in the early months of Ndabeni’s tenure that would eventually render his position at the agency untenable.

It all began on the morning of 13 November 2008, when the sheriff of Nelspruit came by for an official visit. The sheriff brought with him copies of a letter of demand, prepared by the Hoedspruit-based firm of attorneys Steyn and Clarke, that accused senior members of the MTPA staff of serious fraud and misconduct.

Ndabeni, caught by surprise, immediately initiated a process to decipher the contents of the letter. He soon discovered that Steyn and Clarke’s clients had been involved in ongoing litigation with the MTPA, and that two high court orders had already been granted against the agency. Since he did not have the benefit of a consolidated handover report from either of his two predecessors, Ndabeni called his entire staff together to request a separate report from each department.

What he would find, according to an affidavit that he would submit to the North Gauteng High Court in May 2020, was that there had indeed been “various instances of fraudulent and illegal activities, breaches in legal compliances and the ultra-vires exercise of power by senior staff”.

Convinced of the truth of these findings, he wasted no time in reporting them to the members of the MTPA board, who acceded to his request for the appointment of a legal compliance officer.

Like Ndabeni, advocate Shukrat Makinde — the woman who would serve as chief governance and compliance officer of the MTPA from 2009 until 2013 — would submit a series of affidavits to the North Gauteng High Court, all to do with the matter of case number 34802/2010.

Unlike Ndabeni, however, one of her affidavits would refer at the top to the primary antagonists in the case, the businessman-turned-conservationist Frederick Coenraad Daniel and the ANC politician David Dabede Mabuza.

In the book that she would release in October 2020, Predator Politics: Mabuza, Fred Daniel and the Great Land Scam, journalist and writer Rehana Rossouw would do a peerless job of explaining how and why Mabuza — who would become deputy president of South Africa in 2018 — came to view Daniel as his “public enemy number one”.

She would note how the years 2008 and 2009, when Ndabeni and Makinde were just beginning to get to grips with the rot at the core of the MTPA, were for Daniel two of the most traumatic years of his life.

It was during this time, according to Daniel, that Mabuza phoned him personally to persuade him to accept the “false land claims” on his private game reserve, failing which “[his] safety could not be guaranteed”.

It was also during this time that Mabuza had allegedly organised a violent demonstration on Daniel’s property, promising the rent-a-crowd that they would “get their land back”.

And yet, as thorough as Rossouw’s book would turn out to be, there were still thousands of pages of written testimony that she would not be able to include, mostly because case number 34802/2010 — the R1-billion damages claim Daniel and his various businesses had brought against the MTPA and a host of government entities in 2010 — had grown in size and import to become one of the most significant civil matters in the history of the North Gauteng High Court.

Also, when Rossouw’s book went to press, it was still expected that the case would go to trial over 25 days in July and August 2020. But at great cost to Daniel and the South African taxpayer, the postponements were fated to continue.

The question for Daily Maverick, given the almost daily additions to the court records since the publication of Predator Politics, was whether it was “fate” that had pushed the trial date out to 19 July 2021, or whether there was something more nefarious at play.

Was Daniel, as alleged by his advocate Jacques Joubert, being denied his section 34 right to a fair public hearing? More to the point, in light of Mabuza’s prominent role in case number 34802/2010, what did the deputy president stand to lose if the matter ever went to trial?

As large as these questions were, though, they appeared during the course of our reporting to be backgrounded by an even larger one — what damage had been done to South Africa’s natural heritage by the culture of corruption that had taken over the MTPA?

Here, Ndabeni’s affidavit laid out the loss in stark and frightening terms.

After detailing how members of his staff had worked systematically to block Daniel’s vision for Nkomazi Wilderness, the private reserve that the businessman had launched with his own funds in 1999, he highlighted the environmental riches of the territory.

The Barberton Mountainlands, Ndabeni testified, where Daniel had staked out his reserve, ranked second only to the Cape Floral Kingdom in terms of South African biodiversity.

“On top of this,” he added, “the grasslands that… formed part of the Nkomazi Wilderness [are] not only the most threatened biome on Earth, but in terms of all the important official government planning studies… created a legal obligation for [the MTPA] to assist the project as a matter of priority.”


Nkomazi Game Reserve in Mpumalanga. (Photo: Flickr / David Olsen)

The exact location of his new residence, Daily Maverick was asked, was not to be disclosed. Daniel had moved out here with his wife and young son in early 2019, after the death threats and the financial losses had become too much to sustain, and now instead of the 39,000ha of derelict farmland he had restored to the endemic wilderness — with its pristine rivers, rich flora and abundant game — he was surrounded by layers of electrified fencing and a pack of skittish dogs.

On this particular Friday afternoon in late November 2020, Daniel was hard at work, moving seamlessly between preparation for the trial and articulation of the lost, but not forgotten dream.

“The only way we are going to save ourselves,” he said, his eyes looking up for a moment from the pair of computer screens he had set up for ease of navigation through his prodigious files, “is if we take people like EO Wilson very seriously.”

By this, Daniel was referring to the great evolutionary biologist’s “Half-Earth Project”, a spin-off of the 2016 international bestseller in which an “achievable plan” was put forward for the safeguarding and regeneration of the planet’s imperilled biosphere: devote half of the terrestrial surface of the earth to nature.

Indeed, on the Half-Earth Project website, where the names on the advisory council read like a user’s guide to interdisciplinary collaboration — the economist Jeffrey Sachs alongside the naturalist Robin Kimmerer, for instance — the concepts bore an uncanny resemblance to the driving philosophy of Daniel himself.

“The crucial factor in the life and death of species is the amount of suitable habitat left to them,” Wilson’s website noted. “As reserves grow in size, the diversity of life surviving within them also grows. As reserves are reduced in area, the diversity within them declines to a mathematically predictable degree swiftly — often immediately and, for a large fraction, forever.”

But again, for Daniel, this was much more than just theory. Since 1998, when he had acquired his first 916ha of farmland from a Badplaas landowner, he had dug intuitively and progressively into the secrets of the local ecosystem, until one day its latent regenerative capacities began to reveal themselves.

A big year for the project was 1999, when Daniel commissioned Prof Wouter van Hoven, director of the Centre for Wildlife Management at the University of Pretoria, to oversee a “preliminary ecological evaluation” of Nkomazi’s natural wealth. The 156-page document, which was completed when the land under review had grown to 6,204ha, opened with an ingenious management plan for what was termed the “enormous” plant diversity.

Van Hoven and his team divided the area into six homogenous units, running from the aloe-dominated mountainsides to the acacias of the woodlands to the proteas of the grasslands. Next came an assessment of veld conditions for the introduction of grazing herbivores, with an acknowledgement of the damage that had been done by the previous owner’s cattle.

Although the area was primarily grassland, the report recommended the introduction of a limited number of browsers — given that “in the long term” the absence of the latter would upset the ecological balance.

Finally, before outlining a veld-burning regime, the report went on to detail which animals would be best suited to Nkomazi Wilderness. The list was long and distinguished, including buffalo, leopard, white rhino and “rare species such as roan antelope”.

Daniel studied the report closely, taking it to heart, picturing the herds in his mind’s eye as he drove the veld in his Land Rover. With the experience of the tourist as a major priority on his agenda, he personally oversaw the course and grading of the roads — following the natural contours of the land, augmenting the perspectives on the rivers, valleys and mountains.

One day, while out on his daily reconnaissance drive, he came across a beautiful piece of San rock art beneath a granite overhang. This would be the first of many such finds, and each would serve for Daniel as a personal “letter” of instruction.

“The thing was,” he recalled for Daily Maverick, “by looking at the San letters, we could see what animals to reintroduce. Wouter was talking scientifically and the San were talking historically. I don’t think anyone has ever linked them.”

And so in 2000, after Daniel had acquired the farms Belvue and Doyershoek, adding 1,973ha of mountain terrain to Nkomazi Wilderness, the list of game got longer.

Burchell’s zebra, blesbok, blue wildebeest, mountain reedbuck, oribi, red hartebeest, waterbuck, sable — all of these were recommended in Van Hoven’s second report, with a number of them mirrored in the ancient paintings on the rock walls.

In 2001, Daniel commissioned a geomorphological investigation from Van Hoven, which focused on the erosion status of the land. There was no report for 2002, but in 2003 he received a letter from the consultancy group International Conservation Services, which stated — following a site visit — that “sensitive and active management” could result in a game experience that was “pretty much unique in the agglomeration of species”.

The emphasis was on the potential for introduction of the “Big 5”: such a thing was possible, according to the consultants, although it would require “substantial financial input and ecological expertise”.

And these two assets, it so happened, Daniel had in spades. In 2005, when the size of Nkomazi Wilderness had expanded to 21,075ha, Van Hoven submitted a 255-page report.

“When predators are stocked in areas that are large enough to support them, they play an important ecological role of eliminating the sick and wounded animals,” the report noted on page 195. “However, in many cases, wildlife ranches are too small and the introduction of carnivores poses problems.”

Three pages later, after noting that the best management practice for predators was “no management at all” — any interference, suggested Van Hoven, would disturb nature’s in-built equilibrium — the report stated the following: “Nkomazi Wilderness is large enough and can sustain prey numbers to feed predators.”

It was EO Wilson’s “Half-Earth” concept in a nutshell, more than a decade before the evolutionary biologist would publish his book and a whole 14 years before the United Nations — through its intergovernmental biodiversity platform — would begin to properly panic about the collapse of the natural world.

In this context, ironically, it was the intention to introduce lions that would accelerate Daniel’s undoing. Although he didn’t know it at the time, there was a faction within the MTPA that wanted the businessman gone. And somehow, the evidence that he would gather would implicate Mabuza.

https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article ... odiversity

[Lisbeth]

I have read about this somewhere, but not the whole story, I think.

The ANC way of doing things

[Richprins]

This case will be significant!

[Lisbeth]

In the right way, I hope

[Lisbeth]

Dead Matter (Part Two): The lion, the conservationist and South Africa’s future deputy president

By Kevin Bloom• 11 March 2021


Deputy president and former Mpumalanga premier David Mabuza. (Illustrative image | Sources / Photos: Gallo Images / Beeld / Theana Breugem) | GroundUp / Ashraf Hendricks | EPA-EFE / Jon Hrusa | EPA-EFE / Kim Ludbrook)

In the second of this three-part series, Daily Maverick drills deeper into the evidence that links the history of fraud and corruption in the Mpumalanga Tourism and Parks Agency to the land claims scam orchestrated and run by senior members of the provincial government. Although the North Gauteng High Court will begin to consider the evidence in July 2021, with Deputy President DD Mabuza watching closely for mention of his name, it’s clear from the facts that precious time has been lost — if South Africa’s biodiversity is to be saved for future generations, the case will need to draw a line in the sand.

In the mid-1990s, when the US government began reintroducing wolves into the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, there was only one beaver colony in the entire national park.

The absence of wolves since the 1930s had triggered an explosion in the elk population, causing the animals to become more sedentary and to browse on young willow shoots — which in turn had triggered a die-off of the plants that the beavers depended upon for survival. By June 2020, thanks to an effect known as trophic cascading, the reintroduced wolf packs had indirectly generated a total of eight new beaver colonies. The ponds and dams built by these beaver colonies would, in turn, have a number of effects on Yellowstone’s stream hydrology, recharging the water table and providing shaded, cold water for fish.

These ecosystem-wide interactions, which occur when apex predators limit the density and behaviour of their prey, effectively blew Fred Daniel’s mind when he first heard about them — he had known that lions were a “flagstone species”, in that they were brilliant at attracting tourists, but he had never suspected they were also a “keystone species”, capable of enriching an area’s biodiversity.

Looking back, Daniel would thus gain a whole new perspective on the fact that the Mpumalanga Tourism and Parks Agency had unlawfully blocked his permit application for lions in 2007. Along with the elephants he had intended to introduce, these “ecosystem engineers” would, by many expert accounts, have turned Nkomazi Wilderness into a natural wonder of stunning proportions.

But there was one account that was perhaps more significant than the rest. In the affidavit he would submit to the North Gauteng High Court in May 2020, Charles Ndabeni — who served as chief executive of the parks agency between 2008 and 2011 — provided insider testimony on the scale and consequences of the agency’s deceit.

After declaring once again that “biological diversity and tourism [were] joined at the hip”, Ndabeni referenced the joint venture set up in 2007 between Nkomazi Wilderness, the Inkaleni Land Owners’ Association, Kerzner International, the Development Bank of Southern Africa and Dubai World.

“The big five would impact on the value of Nkomazi Wilderness and were crucial for financial and ecological sustainability and a requirement to build and operate seven-star safari lodges,” he testified, referring to the serious investment commitment that Sol Kerzner’s One&Only group had made in Daniel’s project.

Then, once he had provided the names of the parks agency’s two most senior scientists at the time — both of whom had endorsed Daniel’s application for lion and elephant permits — Ndabeni got to the nub of the matter.

“[The] application for elephant was approved on 2 October 2007,” he testified, immediately adding that “the issue of the permit was withheld by Jan Muller, and issued to Dubai World in September 2008, which included permits to reintroduce cheetah and lion.”

The thing was, Daniel had sold his remaining 50% share in Nkomazi Wilderness to Dubai World in March 2008, after the joint venture had collapsed. In her book Predator Politics: Mabuza, Fred Daniel and the Great Land Scam, journalist Rehana Rossouw would write that the parks agency had been “instrumental in destroying” the partnership. According to the evidence provided to Daily Maverick, which squared with the narrative in Predator Politics, the government agency was all too happy to bend its own rules when it came to the “corrupt” business practices of Sultan Ahmed bin Sulayem and his Gulf-state underlings, but for Daniel — who had proved himself incorruptible — the rules were a constant brick wall.

So who, then, was Jan Muller? And what was his connection to David Dabede Mabuza, the man who would become deputy president of South Africa?

To begin to answer these questions it was necessary to return to the affidavit of Ndabeni, who had taken on the CEO role at the parks agency long after the fix was in. Muller, it so happened, was the incumbent head of Wildlife Protection Services at the agency when Ndabeni arrived, and the man to whom the latter’s internal investigation process — overseen by forensic consultant Paul O’Sullivan — ultimately pointed.

In one of Ndabeni’s first meetings on the matter with senior staff, Muller had reportedly informed him that Daniel “was a criminal who had acquired land illegally in Badplaas which he was now occupying unlawfully and that he was a troublemaker who thought he was above the law”. Ndabeni further testified that Muller had characterised Daniel as “a racist who exploited poor communities and placed more value on rocks, plants and wild animals than on people”.

Which was a strange thing for the head of Wildlife Protection Services to say, especially given Daniel’s track record of working with local communities, not least the Inkaleni Land Owners’ Association — the grassroots organisation that had been granted R75-million in free shares in the (scuppered) joint venture.

The reason for Muller’s intransigence, it turned out, was directly linked to his dual position as head of the Problem Animal Fund, which had been set up to sell hunting rights for escaped wildlife and was operating a separate bank account within the parks agency. It wasn’t long after Ndabeni had been informed of the separate account that he learnt of the irregular conjoining of two departments — one responsible for the issuing of wildlife permits and the other engaged in law enforcement. With Muller in control of both departments, Mpumalanga’s privately owned fauna were, officially, no better off than cattle on their way to slaughter.

Or, in the phrasing of Ndabeni under oath:

“It became apparent that the wildlife permit system had been repurposed from providing a critical service to the private sector, who relied on the system as necessary tools to maintain and protect biodiversity on their land, to a system that thrived on exploiting the province’s biodiversity to keep the [Problem Animal Fund] flush. To complicate matters, the law-enforcement arm was abused to eliminate any competition for the PAF [and] to create a monopoly that controlled the hunting and killing of wild animals, especially lion, elephant and wild predators.”

In other words, Muller had denied Daniel his application for lion and elephant permits because the legitimate work of the MTPA was an obstacle to the contents of its secret account, which he personally controlled. And while it was unclear whether Muller had ever heard of the concepts of trophic cascading or keystone species (when invited to comment for this series, he told Daily Maverick that his counsel had advised him to decline), it was a fait accompli that as the head of Wildlife Protection Services such knowledge was a core component of his job.

Either way, where the keystone species of Mpumalanga’s private reserves should have been allowed to perform their evolutionary role — or better yet, where they should have been “protected” as ecosystem engineers; remarkable animals that for tens of millennia had regenerated and balanced the virgin African bush — they had become items to be bought and sold, their bodies cut up and served as bushmeat, their heads mounted as trophies on hunters’ living room walls.

***

Of the thousands of documents that Daniel’s legal team were poring over during their preparation for the appearance of Case Number 34802/2010 in the North Gauteng High Court, there were two that appeared to establish an evidentiary link between the parks agency and Deputy President Mabuza. One of these documents, which displayed an agency letterhead and was addressed to Ndabeni as the CEO, was authored by Muller himself.

Dated 24 November 2008, its contents concerned “recent developments at Nkomazi” — and while it was unsigned, it would read in hindsight as an attempt by Muller to throw Ndabeni off the scent.

The first item in the memo dealt with the confiscation of 72 animals from Nkomazi Wilderness — including eight leopards, four cheetahs, seven wild dogs and 24 indigenous ducks — during two respective raids in November 2007 and June 2008. Covered at length in Predator Politics, the story essentially involved a slapstick back-and-forth between the parks agency, the state attorney in the Mpumalanga premier’s office, Daniel’s former attorney Richard Spoor, a Jet Ranger helicopter and the Carolina Magistrates’ Court. As Rossouw would make plain in her astonishing book, the confiscations were all part of a much broader vendetta against Daniel. At the time, however, Muller had affected the stance and tone of an unimplicated third party.

The second item in the memo concerned Daniel’s application for an animal rehabilitation centre at Nkomazi. Here, Muller felt secure enough to furnish his boss with a list of (somewhat circular) reasons the application had been denied.

But it was in the memo’s third item, which dealt with Daniel’s application in 2000 to have Nkomazi officially proclaimed a private reserve — with one of his registered companies, Grand Valley Estates (Pty) Ltd, as the “management authority” — where Muller may have been subtly attempting to scare Ndabeni out of his wits. Because, while Muller may have acknowledged that the Government Gazette had ratified the proclamation in August 2001, he would still frame the issue of management authority within the country’s most explosive context.

“This division came to the conclusion that the land claims might be the reason for the proclamation not being affected,” he stated.

When Muller wrote these words, as Ndabeni would have known, Mpumalanga’s MEC for agriculture and land affairs was none other than Mabuza. What Ndabeni could not have known was that the chief coordinating officer of Mpumalanga’s regional tourism organisation, Athol Stark, would later offer identical testimony to the Carolina Magistrates’ Court. Stark would recall an incident that had occurred in 2006, when he had visited the office of Ndabeni’s predecessor, Abe Sibiya, to discuss Daniel’s situation. During the meeting, Sibiya had stepped out to make a call — and so, what Stark had inadvertently overheard would go down on the court record:

“I heard what they were discussing and Mr Abe Sibiya was telling the gentleman that the land claims must be, is the reason, why the permits must not be issued… and I thought, my goodness, I am not supposed to even be standing here and I stepped back into the office.”

How this too linked back to Mabuza, who at the time was a member of the Mpumalanga provincial legislature, was one of the central subjects of Rossouw’s book. The land claims on Nkomazi Wilderness, as Daniel’s legal team had proved as far back as 2000, had all been bogus. The claims had allegedly been part of a huge and ongoing scam in the Mpumalanga government to inflate farm prices and split the difference with middlemen. But Mabuza, when he took over the MEC role in 2008, had reportedly taken the game to a whole new level — so much so that in 2017 forensic investigator O’Sullivan would open a case of fraud against the future deputy president, arguing on his website that “pretty much all the land restitution claims in Mpumalanga” during Mabuza’s tenure as MEC were false.

Daniel’s problem, needless to say, was that he didn’t know when to quit.

“The first time I heard David Mabuza’s name,” he told Daily Maverick during a series of follow-up meetings at his home in late 2020, “was some time in 2003, when Pieter Visagie ran around saying he had political connections.”

Visagie, it transpired, was the most notorious of the middlemen identified by O’Sullivan. As evidence of the connection between Mabuza and Visagie, the investigator would include on his website an approval-of-payment document for R3.3-million to the latter, signed in January 2009 by the former MEC.

And yet, despite such evidence, Mabuza would consistently deny all wrongdoing, with the office of the deputy president informing Daily Maverick for this series that it would rather not comment on the “blatantly false allegations” and instead leave the matter for “the justice system to impartially perform its constitutional duty.”

Even so, there was no denying the culture of corruption that had been rotting the Mpumalanga government since the late 1990s — and here, the damage to the province’s irreplaceable biodiversity extended a lot further than Nkomazi Wilderness. DM

[Lisbeth]

Incredible where some people can arrive to protect their own dirty affairs

Just imagine what Nkomazi could have been today if Daniels had been allowed to work!

[Lisbeth]

Dead Matter (Part Three): David Mabuza, Fred Daniel and the trial of Mpumalanga’s collapse

By Kevin Bloom• 15 March 2021


Deputy president and former Mpumalanga premier David Mabuza. (Photo: Gallo Images / Sunday Times / Masi Losi) | Gauteng High Court. (Photo: Gallo Images / Lefty Shivambu) | Adobe Stock

With political corruption on the rise as fast as natural resources are running dry, the protection of the planet’s biodiversity faces a dark and dangerous threat — and nowhere is this as obvious as in the damage that has been done to Mpumalanga’s game parks. To this end, can Deputy President David Mabuza afford to allow the North Gauteng High Court to consider the evidence in Fred Daniel’s R1-billion civil suit? Whatever the answer, it won’t be about the money.

At the end of January 2021, in amongst the headlines on Covid-19 and the virulent new British strain that was set to hit the United States “like a hurricane,” the Los Angeles Times published an op-ed that riffed on a brand-new addition to the English lexicon: “collapseology”. It was heavy reading for the paper’s Sunday edition, particularly given the new dawn that was supposed to have been heralded by the inauguration of Joe Biden, but the facts in the piece were as true as they were newsworthy. For many decades, the authors noted, an ever-growing number of scientists had been warning that the exploitation of the planet’s resources would lead to societal collapse — lately, they added, some of these scientists were suggesting that the collapse may have already begun.

A key reference in the op-ed was the 1972 text Limits to Growth, commissioned from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology by the Club of Rome. In that famous paper, an international team of researchers had concluded that the earth’s interlocking resources would “probably not” support economic and population growth much beyond the year 2100, “even with advanced technology”. The researchers’ computer simulations had delivered twelve future scenarios, from relative peace and prosperity under high mitigation to pretty much apocalyptic on a “business as usual” trajectory.

“The gloomiest model was the one in which the ‘present growth trends in world population, industrialisation, pollution, food production and resource depletion continue unchanged’,” the authors of the op-ed observed. “In that ‘business as usual’ scenario, collapse would begin slowly in the 2020s and accelerate thereafter. Updates to the ‘Limits’ study have found that its projections, so far, have been spot-on.”

And indeed, an update out of Harvard University, published in March 2020, revealed that the gloomiest model had “possibly” come to pass — although the researcher, not wanting to put too dark a spin on things, had chosen to close her paper in the passive voice:

“This suggests,” she wrote, “that humanity is on a path to having limits imposed on itself, rather than consciously choosing its own.”

Euphemisms aside, the Harvard update was in line with a range of alarming pronouncements about near- to medium-term collapse, including an open letter published in the Guardian in December 2020 by scientists representing more than 30 nations (“A warning on climate and the risk of societal collapse”); a report by Future Earth published in February 2020 that collated the work of climatologists, sociologists, economists and ecologists to conclude that the story of our “collective future” would be written in the coming decade (“Our Future on Earth”); and a shrill breaking news item on 26 January 2021 that presaged the imminent inundation of planetary coastlines (“Speed that ice sheets are melting ‘confirms the worst-case scenario’”).

Then there were the hard facts of science, intricately linked to the above, that spoke of the decimation of species other than the human — for instance, the fact that 76% of insect biomass on earth had recently been wiped out, or that Africa’s elephant population had plummeted from 20 million to 400,000 in less than two centuries.

The upshot of it all, if indeed there was one, was that “collapseology” could hardly be considered the domain of doomers and flakes. All across the globe, from deep in the Amazon rainforest to the halls of the United Nations in New York — where, in January 2020, the Convention on Biological Diversity had called for a third of the surface of the earth to be “under protection” by 2030 — men and women had been waking up to the reality that the data translated into life-threatening situations on the ground. And in South Africa, if there was one human being that lived the data in his bones, his name was Fred Daniel.

“A judge needs to see my case against the backdrop of the much larger context,” he told Daily Maverick, during a telephone conversation in early February. “We are so obsessed with the mechanics of corruption that we lose touch with the biggest issues we have ever faced as a species.”

The case Daniel was talking about, as outlined in Part One and Part Two of this series, concerned the R1-billion damages claim that he had brought against the Mpumalanga Tourism and Parks Agency and a host of government entities in 2010. Due to kick off in the North Gauteng high court on 19 July 2021, the long-delayed civil suit had lately been punted in the media as a David-and-Goliath battle between Daniel and South Africa’s deputy president, David Mabuza, who had served as MEC for agriculture and land affairs in the Mpumalanga provincial government in 2008-09 before becoming the Premier in 2009. But as far back as 2003, when he was still buying up farm plots in fulfilment of his vision to regenerate one of the most threatened biomes on Earth, Daniel had been blowing the whistle on the land claims scam that the government office had allegedly been running with local middlemen — and for his troubles, even after he had been forced to sell his private reserve, he would face down harassment, smear campaigns and an endless supply of death threats.

This, then, was the “mechanics of the corruption” that Daniel was hoping the judge would be able to see beyond. Not that the corruption itself wasn’t important — in terms of the plaintiffs’ evidence, it was of course the core of the case — just that Daniel was looking at things from many floors up. During the dozens of telephone calls and meetings that went into the reporting for this series, he would consistently refer to the latest reports on the collapse of the planetary biosphere. The Club of Rome’s Limits to Growth, alongside EO Wilson’s classic call-to-arms Half-Earth, had in every sense become the articulation of his personal True North.

But again, as detailed in part I of the series, Daniel’s objectives were way more than rhetorical. In 2001, a full 15 years before Wilson would begin to parlay his bestseller into the “Half-Earth Project” — a global initiative to safeguard the planet’s biodiversity by protecting vast tracts of land and sea — Daniel was in touch with the Peace Parks Foundation, driving the effort to conceptualise and create Africa’s seventh Transfrontier Park.

The strategy was to unite his private reserve, Nkomazi Wilderness, with the surrounding reserves to form the Greater Barberton Mountainlands Conservancy. In the early years, the Mpumalanga provincial government appeared to back the project; there were even planning studies that linked Nkomazi through a system of corridors to the Kruger National Park, with the Malolotja Nature Reserve in Swaziland eager to sign on.

It wasn’t long, however, before the culture of corruption that drove the land claims scam had seeped into the parks agency. And on this point, Daniel was sitting on more than enough evidence to show the North Gauteng High Court why the damage to Mpumalanga’s biodiversity had been province-wide.

***

In 2007, when it was plainly apparent to Daniel that the Mpumalanga Tourism and Parks Agency (MTPA) would do everything they could to derail his vision for Nkomazi Wilderness and the broader Barberton Mountainlands biome, he commissioned an investigative report from a Cape Town-based consultant by the name of Dick Wensing. Although he was located on the other side of the country, Wensing’s resumé made him perfect for the job — in 2001, he had been hired to assist with the commercialisation of the agency, a task that he had found nigh impossible due to the fact that “the organisation did not take kindly to the possibility of change.”

Seven years later, instead of transformation in the direction of cooperation with the private sector, Wensing would discover that the MTPA had declared an all-out war on the province’s private operators. After detailing the land claims saga and the history of the denial of permit applications faced by Nkomazi Wilderness, which at the time had an investment value of R250-million with a further R1-billion earmarked for “the next several years,” he sent Daniel a series of “private and confidential” notes that took in the wider context.

One of these notes considered the case of Johan Moller, who, along with his father Koos, had sold 5,000 head of livestock to raise funds for the conversion of their 18,000-hectare cattle farm into the Igwala Gwala conservancy. In the mid-2000s, Moller informed Wensing, when the MTPA were having trouble paying their own salaries, a team from the agency’s game capture unit had slipped through the gates of Igwala Gwala uninvited.

“It started when I got a phone call,” Moller explained, “saying they urgently needed to take off animals, specifically rhinoceros… to pay for the [MTPA] salaries. I declined.”

According to Moller, after the team had “illegally removed” the rhinos and taken “three additional animals,” he had confronted them — “at one stage it was so bitter that pistols were drawn,” he said. Allegedly, Moller was then informed by members of the unit that the agency operated “above the ordinance” and that they “would not be dictated to by private business.”

Next, Wensing’s addendum on the Moller case stated the following: “To reinforce their point, they ruthlessly and mindlessly shot all his lion, his elephant and unlawfully removed rhinoceros.”

Of course, if this was a standalone story, it would have demanded a requisite level of authentication. But given that Wensing’s notes on the matter were peppered with the presence of Jan Muller, who at the time was operating an illegal “problem animal” fund within the MTPA — as described in the second part of this series — the story appeared to add up. Also, there was the fact, included by Rehana Rossouw in her book Predator Politics: Mabuza, Fred Daniel and the Great Land Scam, that Muller had confessed his wrongdoings to forensic investigator Paul O’Sullivan in 2017.

(When invited to comment for this series, Muller told Daily Maverick that his counsel had advised him to decline)

What Rossouw had not included in her book were any of Wensing’s “private and confidential” notes to Daniel, and so there was no mention of Moller’s run-in with the MTPA In Predator Politics, nor of the fact that after the saga he had been forced to abandon his dream. Neither was there any mention in the book of Simon Rufus, whose commercial horse-riding concession in the Songimvelo Game Reserve had met a similar fate.

Rufus, it appeared, had crashed into the MTPA’s ploy to transform large swathes of the national park into cattle pastures and dagga fields. Almost every other week, he told Wensing, he would “notice new cattle with new brands arriving.” In his summary of the situation, he referred to the South African government’s stipulations regarding “protected areas under land claim” — such areas, he correctly noted, could not be used for any purpose aside from nature conservation. And yet, he said, the Songimvelo cattle herders would “on occasion chase [the horse riders] out of the reserve.”

Which aligned, in turn, with the recollections of senior staff at the parks agency, one of whom told Wensing that land claims, in the months prior to the March 2008 cut-off date, had been “popping out of the woodwork for every piece of land owned by the MTPA.” This particular staffer, who held the title of general manager for commercialisation, recalled how very few of the claims had been adequately verified. He further recalled how “almost all claims” had been awarded with the right to work the land.

For Songimvelo, whose siSwati name means “we are conserving nature,” this would result, according to news reports, in cattle outnumbering wildlife by 2011. The damage would continue throughout the decade, as evidenced in the so-called “Songimvelo Syndicate” running guns through Swaziland and employing gangs of illegal gold miners, or in the 2019 discovery and destruction of dagga plantations worth more than R21-million.

But if there was an underlying tragedy behind the demise of Songimvelo, it was that Daniel himself once had big ambitions for the 49,000-hectare reserve.

In the affidavit that he would submit to the North Gauteng High Court in May 2011, Bruce Hutchison, the former vice-president of the Kerzner Group’s Africa Operations, would state the following:

“I saw an opportunity for Songimvelo and Nkomazi to be joined in order to create a unique and viable wildlife area, just south of the Kruger National Park, that would fit perfectly with [Sol] Kerzner’s vision.”

Kerzner had personally given the go-ahead for the project in August 2003, Hutchison testified, following which a meeting had been set up with the parks agency. But the agency’s former CEO, Abe Sibiya, had insisted that he would not sit in a room with Daniel — instead, he had invited the regional land claims commissioner.

“Why he did so remains a mystery,” Hutchison added, “because the land claims were not relevant to the business under discussion.”

***

In mid-November 2020, Daily Maverick was sent a memorandum in which Daniel’s advocate, Jacques Joubert, asserted that Deputy President Mabuza had abused his position of power to deny the plaintiffs their section 34 right to “a fair public hearing”. The memo, which ran to dozens of points over six pages, was a detailed summary of the defendants’ alleged obstructionism in Case Number 34802/2010 of the North Gauteng High Court. Whatever the allegations, however, the facts had been recorded in the judicial record and were therefore beyond dispute.

It all kicked off during a pre-trial meeting in April 2018, when it was decided that the merits of the case would be separated from the quantum, with the former requiring an estimated 25 court days to be adjudicated. On 28 May 2019, the deputy judge president issued a directive to enrol the case on a preferential basis for 25 court days, from 27 July to 28 August 2020. Then, on 18 February 2020, Acting DJP Potterill, “upon request of the plaintiffs and without objections from the defendants,” issued a further directive to reinstate judicial case management — defined in the legal dictionary as a “proactive approach” that seeks to avoid a process “which requires or relies upon reaction.”

Importantly, at the above meeting, the state attorney also informed the parties that Mike Hellens (SC) would replace Andre Ferreira (SC) as counsel for Mabuza in his personal capacity. Hellens, as everyone in the room would have known, had previously represented former president Jacob Zuma and his son Duduzane — which was doubly poignant given that Mabuza was not in fact the current seventh defendant, listed on the court papers as the Mpumalanga MEC for agriculture and land affairs (a position, as above, that Mabuza had held in 2008 and 2009).

Seven days later, the so-called seventh defendant, along with the first and fourth defendants — the MTPA and the Mpumalanga regional land claims commissioner, respectively — brought an application for discovery of a confidential document, a reactive request that ran contrary to the agreed-to principles of case management.

“They threatened that the confidential document would dispose of the entire claim and result in a devastating punitive cost order against the plaintiffs,” Joubert noted in his memo, before adding: “Nothing came from the threat after the plaintiffs discovered the document.”

And yet, on 15 May 2020, the first, fourth and seventh defendants — again ignoring the directive for judicial case management — served a 108-page “request for further particulars” on the plaintiffs, while escalating the threat of a punitive cost order.

For the next six weeks, with the trial date looming, the plaintiffs scrambled to deliver these further particulars, finally submitting the document on 25 June. On 1 July, with the Covid-19 lockdown in full swing, Justice Molefe (the trial judge) hosted the parties on Microsoft Teams for the first case management meeting — she proposed during the meeting that the trial be held virtually, with every effort made to shorten its duration.

On 18 July, nine days before the trial was set to begin, the state attorney copied the judge on a letter to the plaintiffs’ attorney, which had been written on behalf of the seventh defendant. Deputy President Mabuza would likely appeal any decision for a trial of this “magnitude” to be conducted virtually, the letter warned. Two days after that, Mabuza discovered his leadership position in land reform and restitution in the office of the presidency — “the purpose,” according to Joubert, “was to promote the idea that the case was political and for that reason required double the originally allocated 25 court days.”

Perhaps cognisant of the cost implications for Daniel and the South African taxpayer, Justice Molefe suggested on 22 July that the case be postponed — the first week of the trial could instead be used for case management, she proposed, with the parties attempting to reduce the number of witnesses. Although there were no objections to this from the defendants, the very next day the state attorney sent another letter “in which he not only expanded his clients’ witness list but also threatened if the plaintiffs reduced their witness list, his clients would consider adding plaintiffs’ witnesses to their list.”

And so, it seemed, the squeeze was on, with absurdities piling atop absurdities. During case management, Advocate Hellens (echoing Jan Muller, as per Charles Ndabeni’s affidavit in piece II), would attempt to cast the matter in broad political terms, framing Daniel as a racist who did not understand the complexities of land reform. To add insult to injury, the first, fourth and seventh defendants would refuse to admit that the plaintiffs actually existed — they would dispute that Daniel owned the land in question, despite the fact that the Mpumalanga regional land claims
commissioner (the office of the fourth defendant himself) had gazetted the properties in 2004.

Written Submissions

By the end of July 2020, with no indication that the parties would be able to curtail the duration of the trial, Justice Molefe postponed the case sine die — meaning that no date was assigned for its rescheduling. It would take until November 2020 for the new date and duration to be discussed, at a case management meeting that neither Hellens nor the state attorney attended. When the new date of 19 July 2021 was finally proclaimed by the Acting DJP of the North Gauteng high court, its duration was set at a mammoth 39 days.

“The 39 days is ridiculous,” said Daniel, during a telephone interview with Daily Maverick in mid-November 2020. “Because if we have our 25 days and we can’t prove the case, why the fuck do they need 39 days?”

His anger was understandable, particularly in light of the rules of the High Court, which stipulated that plaintiffs in a civil matter had to secure counsel’s fees for the entire duration of the trial. At R60,000 per day for senior and junior counsel, this meant that the plaintiffs in Case Number 34802/2010 would now have to fund (in advance) fees of R2.34-million, with indirect costs of around R7-million. And this was disregarding the 40 court actions that Daniel had successfully brought against the state since 2005, which had demanded a combined outlay of R20-million, although some of it had been repaid by the South African taxpayer.

On this point, clearly, Deputy President Mabuza would spare no expense. His denial of the allegations had been laid out in the only affidavit he had ever submitted to the North Gauteng high court, in March 2011, when he was the premier of Mpumalanga Province.

“[Daniel] is a businessman who allegedly invested millions in developing the Nkomazi Project,” Mabuza testified. “His main concern centres around the ‘land claims issue’. That issue was fully investigated and reported on. It was also fully ventilated in the Land Claims Court.”

But there had been no “full investigation” of the issue that Daily Maverick could locate, other than the forensic audits conducted by Ernst & Young, Derrick Griffiths of the Institute of Valuers and private investigator Paul O’Sullivan, which had all concluded that the land claims scam was real. Neither could Daily Maverick find any evidence that the Land Claims Court had ventilated the matter. By all accounts, Case Number 34802/2010 would be the first time that senior politicians would have to answer for the scam, which was why, presumably, the defendants were ignoring the directives of the judge.

And yet Daniel, as ever, was standing firm. Together with his long-time business partner John Allen and his advocate Joubert, he was dealing with each obstacle as it arose. In the 23 years since he had begun to buy up farm plots in the Barberton Mountainlands, he had never once lost sight of his vision. Against the spectre of planetary collapse, everything else seemed incidental — including the fact that he had developed a reputation as one of the bravest whistle-blowers in the country.

“This court case is about the much bigger impacts of state capture, we are so bloody out of touch in South Africa,” he told Daily Maverick. “There’s a global ecological crisis, for God’s sake, and corruption is the source of it, no question.”

The court case, then, was equally about the way through. Daniel had seen with his own eyes how quickly a degraded ecosystem could be regenerated; now, with the national attention he had garnered, he was hoping that the rest of us would see it too. DM

[Lisbeth]

Real life is much more fantastic than any movie plot

There ought to be a "someone" to investigate every time a legal case is postponed. The excuses are, to say the least, solutions with ease and a sense of opportunity and convenience, hard to believe

Hat off to Mr Daniel. He must be a tough guy.

It is incredible the amount of damage that a dishonest person in a top political position can perpetrate.

This case makes me furious (If what is written is all true)

I am looking forward to seeing what is going to happen!

[Lisbeth]

Conservationist vs Deputy President Mabuza: Fred Daniel gets his R1bn day in court after 11 years

By Kevin Bloom• 18 August 2021


Illustrative image | Sources: Deputy President and former Mpumalanga premier David Mabuza. (Photo: Gallo Images / Sunday Times / Masi Losi) | Gauteng High Court. (Photo: Gallo Images / Lefty Shivambu) | Wikimedia | Twitter | Adobe Stock

Since July 2010, conservationist Fred Daniel has been seeking justice in the Pretoria High Court for the loss of his 39,000-hectare nature reserve — which, he argues, was brought about by his run-in with the Mpumalanga politicians that were behind the alleged land claims scam. The opening day of the virtual trial saw explosive testimony from forensic investigator Paul O’Sullivan on the ‘Problem Animal Fund’.

Pitched as a battle between Daniel and Deputy President David Mabuza, the matter finally went to trial on Tuesday. The opening day of the virtual trial saw explosive testimony from forensic investigator Paul O’Sullivan on the “Problem Animal Fund”.

“The problem we have here is that the animals don’t just need to be protected, they need to be protected from the people that are protecting them,” said O’Sullivan, around 25 minutes into the first day of the virtual trial of case number 34502/2010 in the North Gauteng High Court.

The time was 12.30 on 17 August 2021, and since 19 July 2021, when the trial was meant to have kicked off, Daily Maverick had been seeking access to the documents and transcripts that we knew were out there somewhere. Given the matter’s history and cast of characters, we had every reason to suspect that the defendants in the case – either government entities or former and current employees of the state – had been leaning on the so-called “Stalingrad strategy” to ensure that the evidence was never heard by a South African court.

As outlined in our three-part “Dead Matter” series published in March 2021, the R1-billion civil claim, initially filed in July 2010, had been cast as a David and Goliath battle between conservationist Fred Daniel and Deputy President David Mabuza. As far back as 2003, when he was still buying up farm plots in fulfilment of his vision to regenerate one of the most threatened biomes on Earth – a vision, we noted, that for a time had become a reality under the name of “Nkomazi Wilderness” – Daniel had been blowing the whistle on the alleged land claims scam run by the Mpumalanga provincial government.

And Mabuza, when he took over as the Mpumalanga MEC for agriculture and land affairs in 2008, had reportedly taken the scam to a whole new level – so much so that in 2017 O’Sullivan would open a case of fraud against the future deputy president, arguing on his website that “pretty much all the land restitution claims in Mpumalanga” during Mabuza’s tenure as MEC were false.

For his troubles, even after he had been forced to sell his 39,000-hectare private reserve – and forgo the backing of Sol Kerzner’s One & Only Group, which had bought into the vision of expanding Nkomazi Wilderness into Africa’s seventh trans-frontier park – Daniel would face down harassment, arson, smear campaigns and death threats. He would become convinced that Mabuza was behind many of the attacks, pointing to a phone call (for which he held the cellular records) where the ANC heavyweight had allegedly persuaded him to accept the “false land claims” on Nkomazi, failing which “[his] safety could not be guaranteed”.

Mabuza, for his part, denied these accusations.

“[Daniel] is a businessman who allegedly invested millions in developing the Nkomazi project,” Mabuza testified in March 2011, in the only affidavit that he ever submitted to the North Gauteng High Court. “His main concern centres around the ‘land claims issue’. That issue was fully investigated and reported on. It was also fully ventilated in the Land Claims Court.”

But there had been no “full investigation” of the issue that Daily Maverick could locate, other than the forensic audits conducted by Ernst & Young (now called EY), Derrick Griffiths of the Institute of Valuers and O’Sullivan, which had all concluded that the land claims scam was real. Neither could Daily Maverick find any evidence that the Land Claims Court had ventilated the matter.

By all accounts, the trial would be the first time that senior politicians would have to answer for the scam, which was why, presumably, the counsel for the defendants were playing what Daniel’s advocate, Jacques Joubert, alleged was an “obstructionist” game.

From Daily Maverick’s perspective, as outlined in the third part of our “Dead Matter” series, Joubert had provided ample evidence that Mabuza was “abusing his position of power” to deny Daniel his Section 34 constitutional right to a fair public hearing. And so, beginning on 4 August 2021, we engaged our own lawyers in an attempt to gain access to the court documents and the trial itself.

Thanks to the efforts of our attorneys, our introduction to the trial appeared to land directly on script.

“I think the judge will rule on that and not you,” Mabuza’s advocate, Mike Hellens, said somewhat curtly to Joubert, less than a minute after Daily Maverick had been given the link to the virtual courtroom.

Hellens, it appeared, did not want to allow O’Sullivan to take the witness stand unless there was an independent observer at his physical address – a measure, he argued, designed to ensure that the witness “wasn’t prompted”.

But Joubert dispatched with the objection quickly, asking O’Sullivan to pan his camera around the office at his residence in London, from where he was providing testimony. Shortly thereafter, Joubert explained that O’Sullivan would be giving evidence on the land claims issue once he had testified on the so-called “Problem Animal Fund” (a pair of narratives, as Daily Maverick pointed out in the second part of our series, that appeared to be interlinked).

As an introduction, O’Sullivan explained that his charity, Forensics for Justice, had as its objective the exposure of South African citizens who were involved in corruption, particularly if those citizens were employed by the state. In the second quarter of 2009, he stated, he was approached by Charles Ndabeni, the then CEO of the Mpumalanga Tourism and Parks Agency (MTPA), to conduct an investigation into one of the agency’s divisions, known as Wildlife Protection Services.

“During that investigation, I became aware that a bank account was being operated,” O’Sullivan testified, “a bank account that was outside the control of the MTPA. It was managed by a couple of individuals, and those were individuals that were running the Wildlife Protection Services, Jan Muller and a chap by the name of De Beer.”

One day in late 2009, O’Sullivan continued, while he was at the Standard Bank offices in Simmonds Street, Johannesburg, “investigating ways of stamping out the fraud that was taking place on the MTPA’s bank accounts,” an instruction came through “to transfer an amount of three point something million rand from the operating account of the MTPA into the Problem Animal Fund bank account… signed by the chief operating officer and another senior officer at the MTPA.”

Using his power of attorney, O’Sullivan stated, he instructed the bank not to transfer the funds until he had looked into the matter. “That’s what triggered the investigation that I did into the Problem Animal Fund,” he said.

In the report that he presented to Ndabeni in 2010, O’Sullivan then explained, he noted that the Problem Animal Fund had morphed from its original intention into “nothing more nor less than a slush fund.” The slush fund was being used, he said, to bypass the Public Finance Management Act, whether for buying or for selling.

“Whenever they did any buying, they just went out and bought. Whenever they did any selling, and the only selling they were doing was the selling of hunting rights, they sold to whoever they felt like selling those rights to. I think I analysed a period of six weeks where six animals were shot, and a large amount of money came into the account, and there were no proper quotations for how that money was spent.

“Nobody could give me an explanation as to why the animals had to be shot. The most common animals being shot were hippos and buffaloes, which were quite high up on the list of hunters’ wishes. And in one case I saw a discrepancy, a hippo was shot one day for R15,000 and another day was shot for R20,000. So none of those figures added up, nobody could give a proper explanation.

“When I asked, ‘why couldn’t you put the animal back from where it had allegedly escaped?’ – and in most cases, these animals had escaped from the Kruger National Park – I was told it was much easier and cheaper just to shoot them.”

O’Sullivan had further noted in his report, which Joubert had submitted as part of the evidence, that the operators of the fund had “decided one day to go out and buy an aircraft”.

They bought “a little kit-type aircraft known as a Fox,” O’Sullivan testified, “which was an experimental aircraft, and yet they were using it for work purposes.” By law, said O’Sullivan, “you can’t use an experimental aircraft for commercial purposes.” But after they bought the aircraft, he said, “they decided they’d all get themselves pilot’s licences, so then they had to pay somebody to give them flying lessons on this aircraft, which is what they did, and that was public funds.”

Once the report had been handed in to Ndabeni, O’Sullivan concluded, he was informed that “the chief finance officer shut down the fund the following week”, transferring the money “into the operating account of the MTPA”.

Joubert, who had let O’Sullivan speak for at least 10 minutes, now had a question of clarity.

“So the Wildlife Protection Services have a mandate to protect the wildlife, am I correct?”

“Yes,” said O’Sullivan, “in fact, in my report, I made the point that the senior management of Wildlife Protection Services were themselves conflicted, because all of them were professional hunters. And therefore they were associating in an environment where people were hunting wildlife. I also made the point in my report that the decision whether to dart an animal… or to hunt it, that decision lay with these executives.

“They could not give me one example of an animal that had been darted and put back in the reserve it had escaped from, which meant every single animal that escaped was shot.”

At this point, Joubert attempted to upload O’Sullivan’s report, but was met with technical difficulties. The judge called an adjournment for lunch, with O’Sullivan explaining that he would have to complete his testimony at a later date – given that the trial had been postponed for a range of reasons since mid-July, he had prior “family commitments,” he said.

Still to come, as far as the narrative in Daily Maverick’s “Dead Matter” series showed, was the evidence of altercations between Fred Daniel and Jan Muller of Wildlife Protection Services, as well as the alleged part played by South Africa’s future deputy president in the land claims scam.

After lunch, there were more technical difficulties, which may or may not have been unforeseen. The parties, as per the live proceedings, could not decide whether to carry on with Microsoft Teams or to move the trial to Zoom. It was a new problem, a Covid-era problem, which meant that another few hours of the 39-day trial had been lost. Still, it was nothing short of a miracle that Daniel had finally won his day in court.

After 11 years, tens of millions of rand in legal fees, smear campaigns and death threats, 17 August 2021 was a day that would probably go down in history. DM

[Lisbeth]

You will find the three parts of the “Dead Matter” series above.

It is not fair that anyone has to wait for 20 years before being able to present his case in a court room